Ignore the Hype

Chapter 6You Must Invest to Meet Your Goal

The previous chapter's exercise for specifically identifying your financial goal is vital to the planning process, because if you don't have a clear vision of what you're attempting to accomplish, you'll find that it is nearly impossible to craft an appropriate approach for getting where you want to go. However, as you just learned, specifically targeting your financial destination really isn't that hard to do. Better still, once you've identified and clarified your financial goal, the next step logically falls into place.

Basically, after you determine how much money you need to accumulate and distribute, you'll need to build a portfolio to accomplish your goals. Building that portfolio can be as simple or as complicated as people want to make it. The approach that follows does have a dash of science behind it, but the real focus is on making it as logical as possible.

Remember, once you build out your portfolio, you're immediately going to walk into a financial haunted house. Financial boogeymen and other nasties are constantly going to jump out and surprise you, trying to get you to abandon your carefully constructed plan. The media and the public at large aren't evil, and they aren't out to ruin your finances. But even when they have the best of intentions, the end result of the mayhem around you will be to make it extremely difficult for you to stay the course.

That's where the logic comes in. Having a portfolio that makes sense ...